A lot of people felt betrayed when they switched to gmail. Those voices were all shouted down.
Jim turned a $1T opportunity into a $30B one.
Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users.
It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...
> They were not anything close to a majority of users.
You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.
Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited.
Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price.
Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit.
If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time.
I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.
That's the prevailing opinion. It's safe to have. IMO, he's just an empty suit that peddles kool-aid. Red Hat was in a unique position as the top kernel contributor for a long time, meanwhile VMware, Google (android), and AWS ate up all the value.
“Bitter”
“White man”
“Facts are a mostly ignorable obstacle”
Please review the guidelines and save the clap trap for reddit.
Since "red hatters" believe they "are open source" and have turned their backs on the community (see the CentOS changes and the active attacks on Rocky Linux) dont know "red hatters" opinion carry much weight in FOSS these days.
Red hatters certainly have an the ego to believe only their opinion matters but reality often does not match ego
To me, I hope I never have to use another software product from RedHat again... I dont know if IBM killed RedHat, or if RedHat just reviled their true colors... either way RedHat is no friend to FOSS, they are just another corporate software company attempting to control FOSS not contributing freely to it.
To me in this day, Oracle is better steward of Linux that RedHat is.
Red Hat and Oracle are more or less the same now
But when it comes to Oracle Linux, atleast they are not putting the sources behind the paywall and threatening customers with bans if they follow their GPL Rights
B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle maintains a kernel package themselves, but that's about it.
C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do.
That's exactly what he meant to communicate by using the traditional angry white man shibboleth of shaking his furious fist at the "Chief Diversity Officer and their ilk" who are active out to get him and ruin his life by making it impossible for him to get a job. Life is just so difficult for him with his anti-diversity disability, you can understand why he feels so angry and threatened and acts out like a toddler in this way.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes - you broke the site guidelines quite badly in several other places in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386
We have to ban accounts that post that way. If you'd please stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
Underperform the rest of the tech sector? No... 70+ quarters of successive double digit growth until the acquisition.
Mismanaged the company with respect to virtualisation? You're conflating mismanaging the company with possible strategic errors in virtualisation.
Destroy FOSS spirit? Absolutely the opposite. He is held in the highest esteem by every red hatter I have ever spoken to. Not only that, but he made the effort to do red hat training to learn the tech in the early days. How has he destroyed any FOSS spirit through his actions? Give an example.
Everyone has macbooks now? No. Sellers generally do, I'll give you that, but technical staff are mostly using Fedora or RHEL. Flexibility has always been a huge part of the employee experience.
Standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors? You sound like an angry white man who can't stand that people other than yourself may have their disadvantage recognised nowadays. Stop feeling so threatened.
Why are you so bitter?